Using Wordtracker

Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com) is the tool that virtually all SEO professionals use. (SEO professionals also like to throw the term SEO around, rather than use the more unwieldy but clearer term search engine optimization.) I generally
don’t like endorsing a product in this manner; elsewhere in this book, I mention products and even state that they’re good. But Wordtracker is a special case. I know of no other tool that matches it or that is anywhere near as popular. And it’s cheap to use, so I recommend that you do so.

Wordtracker, owned by a company in London, England, has access to data from several very large metacrawlers. A metacrawler is a system that searches multiple search engines for you. For example, type a word into Dogpile’s search box
(www.dogpile.com), and the system searches at Google, Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, AltaVista, and many others.

Wordtracker gets the information about what people are searching for from Metacrawler.com, Dogpile.com, and others, for a total of over 150 million searches each month. It stores two months of searches in its databases, somewhere around 310 million searches.

Wordtracker combines the data for the last 60 days and then allows its customers to search this database. Ask Wordtracker how often someone searched for the term rodent, and it will tell you that it had been searched for (at the time of writing) 77 times over the last 60 days but that the term rodents is far more popular, with 527 searches over the last 60 days.

Certain searches are seasonal — pools in the summer, heaters in the winter, and so on. Because Wordtracker has only the last 60 days of information, it may not be representative for a full year for some terms. And some searches may be influenced by the media. While searches for paris hilton were very high in November and December 2003, it’s likely they’ll be much lower by the time you read this. (We can hope, anyway.)

Here’s what information Wordtracker can provide:
_ The number of times in the last 60 days that the exact phrase you entered was searched for out of 310 million or so searches
_ An estimate of how many times each day the phrase is used throughout all the Web’s search engines
_ Similar terms and synonyms, and the usage statistics about these terms
_ Terms used in hundreds of competing sites’ KEYWORDS meta tags, ranked according to frequency
_ Common misspellings
_ A comparison of how often a term is searched for with how many pages appear for that term — a nice way to find terms with relatively little competition

Do metacrawlers provide better results? Here’s what Wordtracker claims:
_ Search results at the big search engines are skewed. Many Web site owners use them to check their sites’ rankings, sometimes several times a week. Thus, many searches are not true searches. Metacrawlers can’t be used for this purpose, so they provide cleaner results.
_ Wordtracker analyzes searches to find what appear to be fake, automated searches. Some companies carry out hundreds of searches an hour on particular keywords — company or product names, for instance — in an attempt to trick search engines into thinking these keywords generate a lot of interest.

Wordtracker is well worth the price. You can pay for access by the day (£4.20, around $7.25 currently), the week (£14/$24.15), the month (£28/$48.31), three months (£69/$119.04), or the year (£140/$241.53). Most professionals in the SEO business have a regular account with Wordtracker, but for individual sites, it may be worth just getting a day or two of access. One strategy is to build your list first, as described in this chapter, and then sign up for a day and run Wordtracker for that day. You may get enough done in a couple of hours; if not, you can always sign up for another day. (Of course these prices may change, so check the Wordtracker site.)

Anyone heavily involved in the Web and search engines can easily get addicted to this tool. Sometimes you’ve just got to know exactly how often people are searching for paris hilton (70,000 times a day), paris hilton video (46,000 times a day), star warsvkid (8,000), or craig the dog faced boy (14).